Colomina Feria

Domesticity at War
Author(s): Beatriz Colomina

Source: Discourse, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 3-22
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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Domesticity at War
Beatriz Colomina
We are always on the edge of war. On the threshold. A line has

been drawn. Literally. In crossing that line we go to war. We go
outside. We leave the homeland and do battle on the outside.
But there are always lines in the interior, within the apparent safe
confines of the house. Even before we step outside we are
engaged in battle. As we all know but rarely publicize, the house
is a scene of conflict. The domestic has always been at war. The
battle of the family, the battle of sexuality, the battle for cleanli-
ness, for hygiene. . . .
It is not only the battle of the sexes which is usually described
in military terms. Domestic hygiene was explicitly understood, at
least from the turn of the century, as an arm of the military
campaign for greater national efficiency. Some of the most
influential texts on health and hygiene in the domestic sphere
were actually written by the military.1 This pursuit of hygiene in
the home reached its highest point in the 1920s and 1930s.
Household cleaning products and appliances were described in
advertisements as military weapons in the domestic campaign
against dust and germs. Some of these appliances were actually
styled to look like weapons. The handle of the Electrolux vacuum
cleaner of 1928, for example, is literally a pistol grip. The house-
wife was constructed as first and foremost a soldier on the home
front. It is amusing but also symptomatic to find that advertisers
and salesmen were far more efficient than the military, teachers,
and hygiene reformers in shaping the public opinion on this
issue. But the "battle" for hygiene was not simply one of rhetoric.
The design of the domestic space itself was believed to influence
health and became the focus of attention of reformists at the end
4 Discourse 14.1
of the nineteent
hospitals had bee
concern for surv
space. The house
military program
to be reevaluated in these terms.
And now, with the apparent demise of modern architecture

we have the emergence of the ecological battle on the home
front. With recycling, even the waste of the house is subjected to
classification. Domesticated. People who lived through World
War II are reminded of wartime, and it is not just because that
was the last time they had to recycle or because that recycling was
about the making of bombs. Recycling is not just associated with
war. It is the waging of war.
"War is no longer identifiable with declared conflict, with
battles," writes Paul Virilio. "Nonetheless, the old illusion still
persists that a state of peace means the absence of open warfare"
{Popular Defense 36). War takes place today without visible fight-
ing. The battlefield of this new war is the domestic interior. The
house is a military weapon, a mechanism within a war where the
differences between defense and attack have become blurred.
An instance of this blurring of limits between war and peace

was offered by CBS news the night of January 15th, 1991, when
the question most insistently asked to the multiple "guests" of
the program, to the war "experts," was: "What signs should we
be looking for in the next two or three days, what signs will
indicate to us that we have really entered war?" That is, the media,
which is supposed to make visible the war, was at a loss at the
moment of identifying what would constitute evidence. The
guests, which are after all guests in the home of the viewer, were
unable to anticipate what the image of the war would be. The
image therefore might arrive in the house before it was recog-
nized. The house is already mobilized.
In fact during the War in the Gulf, Cable News Network
literally advertised itself with the line "CNN brings the front line
to your living room," that is, to what we used to call the "front
room." Not only do we have here the collapse of the "outside"
space into this line, this front, but also since this line is unclear,
war today speaks about the difficulty of establishing the limits of
domestic space.
1964. The New York World's Fair (two years after the Cuban
Missile Crisis) . Its architecture was dismissed at the time (and still
is today) as "too commercial," "too vulgar," without "architec-
tural unity ," and perhaps most symptomatic, without masters.
Winter 1991-92 5
"Where are Kahn,

ster Fuller, Kiesler.
("Razzmatazz" 98) .2
could consider Interi
Record as such) lam
Holiday , a popular
response: "Most of
ters. . . . Too comm
any fair. ... It is pr
lends to Flushing
World's Fair should
triviality I would gr
out" (Lyon 50).
The accusations of
the absence of ma
culture. The attack
forms of mass cul
antiquated artiller
against the direct
tural magazines we
their own foundations.
The Fair presented to the viewer, in the words of the reporter

for Holiday , "a world computerized to the teeth, a push button
world":
At the Better Living Center there is a computer to tell you

what colors to use in decorating your home. ... At the
National Cash Register pavilion a computer feeds out facts to
help children with their homework. At the Parker Pen pavil-
ion, a computer will find you a pen pal somewhere in the
world . . . and at the Clairol pavilion, a computer advised my
wife what color she should dye her hair: "Don't be a sissy," a
soft, electronic female voice whispered in her ear, "go ahead,
do it!" (Lyon 50)
Not only were these computers (descendants of the first com-

puter which was developed to decode enemy messages during
World War II) "concerned" exclusively with domestic issues
(displacing onto themselves traditional forms of domestic rela-
tions in areas as crucial as housework, decoration, companion-
ship, and advising), but moreover, domestic space itself was
deeply disturbed. Embodied within the popular kitsch of the
1964 World's Fair were elaborate propositions about the status
of the modern interior ; something that could not be recognized
by architectural magazines.
6 Discourse 14.1
One such propos

tional suburban ra
new threat of nuc
Texas military ins
houses who in 19
commissioned by
demonstration fa
ment of Civil De
following terms:
I saw the merit of

radioactive fallout.
cal warfare, I knew
himself were by n
Despite President K
was only temporar
upon us, and long
humanity from po
Swayze quickly t
project for a fam
home and its surr
be protected in co
with these ideas
cannot live in constant fear of war, storms or uncomfortable
temperatures, the 'better way' must offer protection from
such" (20).
The equation of war with weather was symptomatic. The

"better way" (Swayze's slogan for the Underground Home)
rested on two "obvious advantages": "constant temperature"
and "security from natural or man-made hazards." The house
offered a controlled environment where one could create one's
own climate by "dialing" temperature and humidity settings:
"the breeze of a mountain top, the exhilarating high pressure
feeling of a Spring day can be created at will. . . . The clamor of
traffic, jets, noisy neighbors - are all gone with a turn of a switch
and you are free to rest in silence, or experience for the first time
the full range of sensations that today's sensitive stereo systems
are able to produce" ( The Underground Home) .
Since in an underground shelter "windows to the outside
world seemed impossible," Swayze developed a survey "to learn
how much value people actually placed upon windows"; he
concluded that windows may be needed psychologically but are
in fact rarely looked through: "With traditional homes we must
Winter 1991-92 7
take what we get for

an artist could do a t
Thus in the Underg
superimposed on so-
the house looks ou
changed at will. (In
Colorado before the F
San Francisco's Golde
to the east.) The time
any mood or occasio
ground Home notes t
the kitchen, while
patio." That is, simul
The displacement o
house problematizes t
between inside and o
abandoned here. The
shell," a clear division is maintained between "interior" and
"exterior" areas. The definitions Swayze gives in his book clarify
that "out-of-doors, backyard, frontyard, patio, courtyard, gar-
den, swimming pool" are "all areas inside the shell."
"Outer/outside" is "anything not enclosed in the shell" (10). By
internalizing even the inside/outside distinction, the Under-
ground Home offered, again in the words of the reporter for
Holiday , "greater security - peace of mind - the ultimate in
true privacy!" (Lyon 62). As the brochure states, "A few feet
underground can give man an island unto himself; a place where
he controls his own world - a world of total ease and comfort,
of security, safety and above all, privacy."
"Peace" was thus to be achieved in the midst of war by
environmental control, control over "the exterior": tempera-
ture, weather, air, light, view. The publicity for the Underground
Home insists not so much on nuclear danger but rather on the
dangers of intruders, insects, and impurities of the air. But with
the seventies, the oil crisis shifted the emphasis to energy con-
servation; and in the eighties, the call to arms was saving the
environment. Accordingly the description of the battlefield
changes. "Ecological catastrophes are only terrifying for civil-
ians," writes Virilio, "For the military, they are but a simulation
of chaos, an opportunity to justify an art of warfare which is all
the more autonomous as the political State dies out" ( Popular
Defense 65-66). The traditional domestic ideal of "peace and
quiet" can only be produced by engaging the house as a weapon
in combat: counterdomesticity.
8 Discourse 14.1
The sponsor of t
tric, which also co
ousel of Progress
history of the inte
transformed the
was a demonstratio
utes. Nuclear powe
offered simultaneo
of the interior.
Transformations of interior/ exterior were the 1964 World's
Fair's main theme. IBM offered the "Information Machine," in
which "fourteen synchronized projectors use nine screens to
show you how lucky you are to have a brain, how your brain works,
and how a computer does its mechanical best to emulate your
cerebration" (Lyon 57). At the IBM pavilion the grandstand
seats move up hydraulically, lifting 500 people into the theater.
To enter the theater is no longer to cross the threshold, to pass
through the ceremonial space of the entrance, as in a traditional
public building. To enter here is to be placed in front of a screen.
The Bell pavilion exhibited the "picturephone."4 And the Coca
Cola pavilion attempted the sensual simulation of countries:
"The visitor experiences not only the sights and sounds of five
foreign countries but also their smells and their temperature
changes. He goes from a crowded street in Hong Kong (past a
fish store whose smell was so overpoweringly authentic that it had
to be deodorized before opening day), to the Taj Mahal, to a
perfumed rain forest in Cambodia, to a bracing ski resort in the
bavarian Alps, to the slowly canting deck of a cruise ship just off
Rio de Janeiro. It is an amusing journey" (Lyon 57). Outside the
Kodak pavilion, the visitor could see the largest color photo-
graphic prints possible; inside one saw how the day's news pic-
tures came in by wire, just as they were received by newspapers
and television stations all over the country. The Kodak pavilion
also offered itself as a stage set from which to take pictures of
yourself and your family with the World's Fair as the background
or in unthinkable places such as the moon (there was a
"moondeck" on the roof).
At the 1964 World's Fair Kodak introduced its new
"Instamatic" camera. With it, the camera, this window into the
world, which in the 1939 World's Fair was still contemplated (lik
television) with amazement, became a mass-consumable techno-
logical object. Moreover these objects were no longer discret
but ubiquitous, part of every space. The instamatic camera was
no longer a technological object of awe, but a cheap piece
Winter 1 991 -92 9
plastic: $8 with a built

camera came, paradox
is, of the "exterior."
in photographs, in s
"exterior" of their (
This is consistent wi
1964 World's Fair in t
could still present th
the city - a modern
object over which the
control. By 1964, how
a unified urban idea. Instead, it offered a collection of
"improbable" places where people might live in the future: on
the moon, in the jungle, under ice, under the sea, and in the
desert.
In general, the organization of space and exhibits at the 1964

World's Fair resonated with the ideas of space represented in its
exhibits. Unlike the visitor to the 1939 World's Fair, the visitor to
the 1964 World's Fair could only achieve "unity" through a
"frame," through a collage of images assembled as s/he moves
through the Fair; the visitor was given the illusion of control, for
example, in his/her manipulation of the images both "inside"
the Underground Home and "outside" on the Fair grounds
themselves.
Ultimately, this "frame" is that of the television screen. At

the 1964 World's Fair, television was everywhere. Virtually every
exhibit involved television. Indeed, the Fair itself was seen at the
time as a big television screen. "The biggest television set in the
world," wrote a reporter, "It will have everything on the 'screen'
except the Beverly Hillbillies, the top rated network show" ("TV
View" 26).
But the 1964 World's Fair never had the popular appeal of
the 1939 World's Fair. Television itself was more appealing. The
time of the Fairs had passed. (In fact, the 1939 Fair is now said
to have been "the last fair on earth.") The mechanism of the
World's Fair, the capturing of everything, was no longer operat-
ing outside, in the traditional public space, on the fair grounds,
but within the domestic interior. The public domain had been
displaced indoors. Or as Patricia Phillips writes:
Just as the public space has become diminished as a civic site,

the home has become in many senses, a more public, open
forum. The public world comes into each home as it never
has before through television, radio and personal computer.
10 Discourse 14.1
So that rituals that

are now still share
ambiguous conditio
Year's Eve in Times
- the throng of peo
lighted apple drop,
watching this congr
One thinks also

Kennedy's assassina
fact, many America
Kennedy's funeral.
The popular privat

rior that had alread
ited throughout th
rary architects. Som
of the city is toda
status of the inte
obscured condition of warfare.
1987. Room in the City , an exhibition organized by Susana
Torre in New York. Several projects addressed, in the words of
the curator, "the self-conscious public character of private life by
envisioning the room as a stage, for the private performance of
public rituals" (Torre 7). In a project for this exhibition, an
apartment by Donna Robertson (with Robert McAnulty), this
stage is "fully dematerialized, transformed into video screens
circling around a single chair for the actor forever turned
spectator" (Torre 7).
The apartment is divided into two parts by a diagonal wall
that slashes through the space. At one end, there is the dining
room table, the traditional site of domesticity; at the other, the
wall passes through the building's facade where it supports the
satellite dish and the broadcast antenna. On one side (the living
area) five video monitors are hooked up to the satellite dish
placed outside the window. These screens show random images
of the city which create an ethereal glow of collaged information.
This flickering light is reflected in a mirror and sent outside
through the window which is itself partially blocked by the
satellite dish. In addition to receiving images through the satel-
lite dish, the house could also broadcast its privacy. On the other
side (the sleeping and bathing area) there is another television
set which, however, is not connected to the dish. Here a small
Winter 1991-92 11
Figure 1. Donna Roberts

1987, plan. Courtesy Do
opening to the outsi

light of the television
Both windows have
letting light in but for
is this?
This project can be r
form of visibility":
I think that electronic

of towns and of the co
early twentieth centur
eras and monitors are
in towns. When you
notice that everything
which is not merely th
police, or of traffic c
supermarkets, the vide
in a closed circuit, an
concerned with an im
artistic, illustrative m
another light, an electr
no longer conceive of s
space or even the space
new lighting. ("Work
12 Discourse 14.1
This new "lightin

control, displaces
primary referenc
Slow House (1989)
security guard in t
is placed in the tru
No man's land. Th
a car. A surrogate e
car, he is outside l
It is the only thing
The blue glow illum
in the light of the
the television. He w
tronic fire. But i
traditional space.
The car windshield and the television screen are both twen-
tieth-century apertures. So is the picture window. But unlike the
first two, the picture window is usually understood as
unproblematically architectural. In Diller and Scofidio's Slow
House, the distinction between architecture and systems of com-
munication is problematized. That is, the deployment of the
windshield (in their words, "the framed transit through vehicu-
lar space") and the television screen ("the framed transit
through electronic space") questions the status of the picture
window.5
Figure 2. Len Jenshel, Sterret, Texas, 1985. Photo: Len Jenshel
Winter 1991-92 13
The picture window

but above all, at issue
The New York Time
"ocean front, ocean v
Diller and Scofidio
nomenclature develop
that feeds on the d
the Slow House, the
value. An advertisement for this area in the New York Times reads:
"spectacular views. Just like Big Sur. With better sunsets. We
didn't want anything less for our beach house." In the Slow
House, Diller and Scofidio juxtapose this view (as seen through
the picture window) with its electronic representation (the same
view as seen on TV) and explore the gap between these two
systems of representation.
This is a rereading and transformation of the rearview mirror
superimposed onto a car windshield. But here, a front view is
juxtaposed onto another front view, which is to say, juxtaposed
onto itself. The Slow House makes problematic the very status of
the view, alienation is produced not between one view and
another, but within the view itself.
The whole house is set up as a spatial transition between the
car and the view. The structure of the road upon arrival is
transformed into that of the garage, such that one does not
simply leave the road, the line, for enclosure. Rather, the wind-
shield is telescoped into the picture window, with the traditional
markers of domesticity occupying the zone of transition. The
front door confronts a knife edge which splits the passage; one
half remains level and deviates to the left (to the sleeping and
bathing areas) , the other half deviates to the right and ascends
(to the cooking, eating, and living areas).
In the living room there is dialectical play between the
television and the fireplace. The television set is suspended in
the space so that the image is superimposed onto that of the
window. The image on the TV is produced from a camera
mounted on a long pole, a transformation of the traditional
chimney. The camera pole points forward, the chimney points
up. One is concerned with bringing something into the house.
The other has to do with getting something out. One removes
pollution from the house. The other brings visual pollution in,
images which, suspended within the anti-perspectival curve of
the house, contaminate traditional architectural order.
The window is a clearly established frame, but here that
frame has no stable context. It is as free-floating as the frame of
14 Discourse 14.1
Figure 3. Elizabeth Di
model. Courtesy Eliza
Winter 1991-92 15
the television scree

marks a deeper affin
and television). The
architecture or some
architecture within its frame. The limits of architecture have
been disturbed. This is an architecture on , in, and after television:
the television cabinet.
With Michael Webb's "Drive-In" House car project (1987),

the car plugs right into the house; even more, it literally turns
into a house. In the "Drive-In" House the automobile body, a
container of media equipment, a cabinet providing a cinematic
gaze through the windshield accompanied by stereo sound, is
turned inside out and occupied. The car, that "most luxuriously
appointed component of vita domestica [which, however] waste-
ful and sad, sits in the drive-way unused for most of the day"6 is
here recycled, separated into parts: the stereo system, the seats,
the windows, the television, the cocktail cabinet, the air condi-
tioning, the telephone. The waste is thus classified, domesti-
cated. A reversal of the cycle of consumption, the "Drive-In"
House becomes an ecological alternative, or, as Webb writes, a
"try anything type answer to mitigate the coming disaster homo-
not-so-sapiens has cooked up - namely the atmospheric warm-
ing." A strategy that further convolutes inside and outside. Webb
writes: "When the penultimate Glad trash bag is full of trash and
has been taken out, I remove the ultimate bag from the packet
and place inside it . . . the packet. Whenever I do this I come over
feeling all architectural: the contained becomes the container,
the container the contained."
In the first underground house built by Swayze for his family

in Texas in 1962, only the double garage is visible outside; the
entrance to the house takes place between the two garage doors.
As Rosemarie Bletter has written, "the garage is the only sign of
human habitation that remained" ("The 'Laissez-Fair' " 128). 7
To which we could add the television antenna and the chimney
(the house's exhaust pipe). A photograph of another under-
ground house built by Swayze shows the television and the
fireplace occupying the same wall, very close to each other, with
the family gathered around them, warming themselves up. But
in a house where the temperature is always kept constant the
function of the fireplace is purely visual. Since the chimney takes
out not only fumes but, as part of the breathing system (the air
conditioning), also "undesirable scents or moisture," it is actu-
ally, like the TV, a window.8
16 Discourse 14 Л
Figure 4. Michael Webb,

Webb.
In the Slow House, the problematic of the car is interiorized

through the transition from the windshield to the garage door,
front door, picture window, and television set. Five frames: the
windshield and its extensions. The curve of the house produces
a car vision, a continuously delayed promise of another view,
another angle. In the living room, the "actual" view is superim-
posed on its electronic representation, but at a slightly different
angle (a shift in the horizon) , it is like traveling without moving.
Winter 1991-92 17
Figure 5. Michael Webb,

Webb.
It is as if the house were sliding in the world, or better, the world

sliding through the house.
Whereas the Slow House is a second residence, a weekend
house accessible only by automobile, Robertson's Room in the
City deals with domesticity in the context of the nineteenth-cen-
tury urban reality of New York which has been displaced by the
new media. The TV/VCR replaces the window, the outside view,
and is also a substitute for travel: "The technology of the VCR
creates a day, an additional 'false-day' [that] comes into being
for you alone, just as in the secondary residence whose heating
turns on of its own accord when it gets cold. . . . The new
windshield is no longer a car, it is a television screen. There is
therefore a much more precise alignment to be made between
the deferred day and the deferred residence" ("Third Window"
187-88).
The "Drive-In" House, finally, is a suburban residence at
home in the new landscape of plastifled valleys filled with gar-
bage, mountains made out of discarded car bodies, and rivers of
medical waste. This "automobile as a house container" is a
nomad's steel and plastic tent for a postnuclear landscape, t
latest, most elusive, war cabinet.
A "cabinet," in common English usage, means: 1) "cu
board or case with drawers, shelves, etc. for storing or displayi
articles," 2) "piece of furniture containing radio or televisi
set" and 3), in terms of politics, "group of ministers controlli
18 Discourse 14.1
Figure 6. Michael Webb

Webb.
Government policy" (The Pocket Oxford Dictionary) . The cabinet

is a space. In the first definition, this space is associated with the
traditional domestic interior, the house? in the second, it houses
the media, in the third, it has been displaced into the media itself.
While the US Cabinet members derive their title from the space
where their meetings take place, that space, that cabinet, exists
above all in the media waves, it is housed by radio, television, and
newspapers. The coexistence (cohabitation) of these apparently
Winter 1991-92 19
disparate meanings
definitions is both
defense . . . and also
The cabinet has both an element of the inside and an element
of the outside. It is both an enclosure, a place, and a window, an
opening. It is both about privacy and about publicity.
Thus, the traditional figure of the cabinet is still an adequate
image for the late twentieth-century interior. Indeed, this inte-
rior is no more than a cabinet. But while the interior of the end
of the nineteenth century offered a refuge from the outside,
from the city, from the public, now the public has invaded the
interior, it is already inside. Refuge is no longer a viable strategy.
Perhaps there is no such thing as refuge anymore. The enemy is
always within. So the only form of defense is counterattack, the
only form of domesticity is counterdomesticity.
The Slow House, the "Drive-In" House, and the Room in the
City all have something of the bunker in them. But they are also
aggressively sending something out into the world. The Slow
House sits on the coastline, the traditional site for a weapon, its
two horns pointing out and up. The Building Commission of
North Haven understood this gesture as a form of visual pollu-
tion and forced the architects to radically shave the poles. When
plugged in, the "Drive-In" House is entrenched, sealed off from
the world, closed in on itself. But then, the car, which is actually
a piece of the interior, part of the house rather than a supplement
to it, goes out into the world to scavenge. But this scavenger is a
high-tech, high-performance car, launched into the refuse of the
world at high speed. The house does regular reconnaissance of
the battlefield that is necessarily its site. With the Room in the
City, the flaneur s perception of the nineteenth-century city is
understood to have been replaced by aimless cruising through
the television channels. The television is a window through which
the spectacle of the city can be seen in a state of distraction. But
this window is not only about receiving a view. The broadcast
antenna alongside the satellite dish allows the house to broadcast
its intimacy to the outside in an age in which the home video is
no longer the video seen in the home but is the video of the home
seen in public. TV not only brings the public indoors, the front
line into our living rooms, it also sends the private into the public
domain. The various battle lines are multiplied, disseminated,
and juxtaposed. The war that is the domestic both occupies and
is about this complex space.
This became very clear during the recent War in the Gulf
when most of the images we received by newspapers or television
20 Discourse 14.1
were either images

smart bombs, the m
16, 1991, for exam
fourth of July fire
interior - the hot
reported the first e
view out their win
the ancient call to
masks carrying on
plastic-lined, gas-p
home in front of th
the screen. And
screens. The "war cabinet," the domestic interior at the end
of the twentieth century, was on display, broadcasting, and also
receiving.
Notes
This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the Center for

Twentieth Century Studies in November 1990 as part of a series of
research seminars on Materializing Culture.
1 For example, Maurice, qtd. in Forty 116. See particularly Forty's

chapter 7, "Hygiene and Cleanliness" 156-81, to which my reading is
indebted.
2 Other reviews of the 1964 World's Fair by professional journals

include "The Busy Architect's Guide to the World's Fair," Progressive
Architecture Oct. 1964: 223-38, "Queen of the Fair," Progressive Architec-
ture Dec. 1964: 160-67, "Best of the Fair," Interiors Oct. 1964: 122-30.
See also Bletter, "The 'Laissez-Fair.' "
3 The Underground Home was constructed by the Underground

World Home Corporation (its president was Jay Swayze) which also
proposed Underground Shopping Centers, Underground Motels, and
Underground Restaurants and Night Clubs. See Bletter, "The 'Laissez-
Fair' I would like to thank her for directing my attention to this house
and Marc Miller for providing original material from the 1964 World's
Fair archives.
4 "[T]he televised telephone, or the tele telephone or the video

phone or whatever it may be called when eventually it is among us,
slaughtering forever such folkways as the blind date, always in the name
of Progress" (Lyon 56).
5 Quotations are taken from conversations between the author and
the architects.
Winter 1991-92 21
6 Quotations are taken

gave at Princeton Univ
"Drive-In" House has s
7 Bletter sees this hous
extreme progression of
wing in the early twent
a vestige of the older st
(when it displaced the o
The Future with a Past,"
house in the Town of To
two-car garage is the ce
between the two domin
old-fashioned front door, or, as the brochure reassures: 'The main
entrance is provided with a normal front door for the convenience of
callers who do not drive in' " (84-85).
8 The etymology of the English word "window" reveals that it
combines wind and eye, as Georges Teyssot has noted, "an element of
the outside and an aspect of innerness." Klein, qtd. in Ellen Eve Frank,
Literary Architecture 263. And by Georges Teyssot in "Water and Gas on
All Floors" 90. There is a channel on American cable TV, "Yule-Tide
Log," that around Christmas time shows a log constantly burning.
9 In the large amount of literature on this theme I would point here
to Gaston Bachelard 's classical text, The Poetics of Space , trans. Maria
Jolas (New York: Orion, 1964), particularly chapter three: "Drawers,
Chests and Wardrobes"; to the extended readings of the domestic
interior by Georges Teyssot, forthcoming as The Disease of the Domicile
(MIT P); and the recent article of Emily Apter, "Cabinet Secrets:
Fetishism, Prostitution, and the Fin de Siècle Interior," Assemblage 9
(1989): 6-19.
Works Cited
Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. "The 'Laissez-Fair,' Good Taste, and Money

Trees: Architecture at the Fair." Remembering the Future: The New
York World's Fair from 1939 to 1964. New York: Queens Museum and
Rizzoli International, 1989. 105-35.
Twentieth Century American Design. New York: Wh

American Art, 1985. 84-127.
Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society

Thames, 1986.
Frank, Ellen Eve. Literary Architecture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.

Klein, E. A Complete Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. New
York, 1966.
22 Discourse 14.1
Lyon, Peter. "A Glor

Maurice, Major Ge
Study." Contemporar
Phillips, Patricia C. "
Dec. 1988: 92-96.
"Razzmatazz at Flushing Meadow." Interiors Mar. 1964: 98-111.

Swayze, Jay. Underground Gardens and Homes: The Best of Two Worlds -
Above and Below. Hereford, TX: Geobuilding Systems, 1980.
Teyssot, Georges. "Water and Gas on All Floors." Lotus International A4:
(1984): 83-93.
"The Third Window: An Interview with Paul Virilio." Global Television.
Ed. Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis. New York: Wedge, 1988.
185-97.
Torre, Susana. Room in the City. Princeton: Princeton Architectural P,

1987.
"A TV View of the Fair." New York Sunday News 12 Apr. 1964, World's
Fair sec.: 26.
The Underground Home: New York World's Fair 1964-1965. Underground

World Home Corp. Publicity brochure.
Virilio, Paul. Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles. Trans. Mark
Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990. Défense populaire et Luttes
écologiques. Paris: Galilée, 1978.
"The Work of Art in the Electronic Age." Interview with Virilio for a
French television program. In English, Block 14 (1988): 4-7.

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Domesticity at War

Author(s): Beatriz Colomina

We are always on the edge of war. On the threshold. A line has

And now, with the apparent demise of modern architecture

An instance of this blurring of limits between war and peace

"Where are Kahn,

The Fair presented to the viewer, in the words of the reporter

At the Better Living Center there is a computer to tell you

Not only were these computers (descendants of the first com-

One such propos

I saw the merit of

The equation of war with weather was symptomatic. The

take what we get for

plastic: $8 with a built

In general, the organization of space and exhibits at the 1964

Ultimately, this "frame" is that of the television screen. At

Just as the public space has become diminished as a civic site,

So that rituals that

One thinks also

The popular privat

Figure 1. Donna Roberts

opening to the outsi

I think that electronic

This new "lightin

Figure 2. Len Jenshel, Sterret, Texas, 1985. Photo: Len Jenshel

The picture window

the television scree

With Michael Webb's "Drive-In" House car project (1987),

In the first underground house built by Swayze for his family

Figure 4. Michael Webb,

In the Slow House, the problematic of the car is interiorized

Figure 5. Michael Webb,

It is as if the house were sliding in the world, or better, the world

Figure 6. Michael Webb

Government policy" (The Pocket Oxford Dictionary) . The cabinet

were either images

This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the Center for

1 For example, Maurice, qtd. in Forty 116. See particularly Forty's

2 Other reviews of the 1964 World's Fair by professional journals

3 The Underground Home was constructed by the Underground

4 "[T]he televised telephone, or the tele telephone or the video

6 Quotations are taken

Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. "The 'Laissez-Fair,' Good Taste, and Money

Twentieth Century American Design. New York: Wh

Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society

Frank, Ellen Eve. Literary Architecture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.

Lyon, Peter. "A Glor

"Razzmatazz at Flushing Meadow." Interiors Mar. 1964: 98-111.

Torre, Susana. Room in the City. Princeton: Princeton Architectural P,

The Underground Home: New York World's Fair 1964-1965. Underground

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